IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 01/05/2010

Steve Jobs reignites the Apple vs Adobe war of words

It's been rumbling on for longer than any of us care to remember now, but Steve Jobs yesterday brought the on-going war of words between Apple and Adobe regarding Flash to a head once again.

It all started with an open letter penned by the head honcho of Apple himself, explaining why Flash would never make it to the iPhone.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

You can read Steve Jobs' thoughts in full at Neowin.

Needless to say, Adobe has been quick to respond, first via Adam Banks' snappily-titled Thoughts on Thoughts on Flash, while Flash developer Jesse Warden has also been quick to point out numerous inaccuracies in Apple's claims:

Incorrect. If a video is H264, that doesn’t mean it can play on the iPhone. If you look at the iPhone specs, you’ll see the only support a subset of what H264 offers, specifically 2 major components to quality video: Using a maximum of the Baseline profile, with Simple for higher bitrates/resolutions, as well as 2.5 for maximum (ish) bitrate.

Not all H264 videos conform to these specs. YouTube converted a lot of their Spark (Flash 6/7) videos to H264 to support iPhone because there was money to be gained in the large investment. Even so, not all YouTube videos work on the iPhone, in part because of the aforementioned reasons. There is a reason why when you upload a H264 video to YouTube, they’ll often re-encode it.

You can read his own thoughts in this article.

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Super Talent SuperCrypt USB 3.0 32GB thumb drive review

Without support for Intel it might take a while for USB 3.0 support to really gain ground, but that isn't stopping more and more USB 3.0 devices from hitting retail shelves. PC Perspective take a look at an extremely impressive USB 3.0 flash drive from Super Talent, although the performance it offers does come at a cost.

The SuperCrypt drive is available in capacities ranging from 16GB to 256GB (!!) and is fully backwards compatible with USB 2.0 hardware so you'll have easy interoperability between all your PCs and notebooks. It works just like any other thumb drive you have used before; plug it in and it just works. That is what has made USB drives so popular. But this drive has two key features to make it stand out: transfer speeds up to 240 MB/s and support for hardware AES encryption.

The encryption works with a dual-drive configuration - there are actually two controllers in the USB drive. The first is a small 32MB drive that includes the encryption application the user runs to authenticate and allow the second drive to activate. If no password has been set, then both drives show up automatically. Once the drive is unlocked it is fully accessible until the drive is removed from the USB port.

You can read the full review over here.

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AMD lost some CPU market share in first quarter

AMD's financial position may be looking a little healthier of late, but according to the latest figures from IDC they're still seeing their market share slide compared to Intel as of the opening quarter of this year.

Although AMD posted a healthy profit not buoyed by juicy settlement money last quarter, the company lost some market share to Intel, according to IDC. The market research firm estimates that AMD's overall share of the global PC processor market fell to 18.8% in the first quarter, down from 19.4% in the fourth quarter of last year and 22.3% a year before.

The Tech Report has more on the story.

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